Today I’m doing double duty. I’m blogging at Austen Authors on my crooked road to publication. Stop by and comment for a chance to win a free book! You can also visit me at the Casablanca Authors Blog, where I tell my latest crazy idea for a variation and how I came up with it.

October is going to be a big blogging month for me with the release of Mr. Darcy’s Obsession. I’ll do my best to post all the links here! Don’t forget that Mr. Darcy’s Obsession is now available for pre-order.

Today is the big day. 21 writers of Austen-related fiction have been working like mad to get the new Austen Authors blog going. I’ve had the chance to get to know my fellow authors better, and I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say.

I’ll be blogging there on September 8.There are lots of giveaways, including my books, so please stop by!

Austen Authors Blog

So much is going on that I don’t even know where to start! To Conquer Mr. Darcy (formerly titled Impulse & Initiative) was released on August 2, but I still haven’t gotten around to doing a giveaway of it here because I’ve been busy working on an exciting new project which will be launched September 6. It’s something that Sharon Lathan and I dreamed up at the Romance Writers of America National Convention, an occasion which deserves a blog post of its own. It’s a group blog of authors of traditionally published Austen-related fiction, and we’ve been astonished with the enthusiastic response we’ve been getting from other writers. We’d optimistically hoped we could get 8 or so writers involved, but we’re up to almost 20 with new ones signing on every day, and even more offering to do guest posts from time to time. I’ll be doing a massive book giveaway there in September, including all my books from out-of-print to my latest release, and there will be tons of other giveaways as well. Be sure to stop by in September!

I’ve also been writing like mad. The next Pemberley Variation is almost finished, despite major efforts by Darcy, Elizabeth, and Georgiana to sidetrack the plot, not to mention the completely unplanned for steamy scene. Advice: don’t trust Jane and Georgiana if they offer to chaperone Lizzy and Darcy. Epic fail! Well, it’s true that I still don’t have the ending down, but it’s almost there. All that sidetracked me from the story I’ve been expanding at 50 Miles, but that’s next on the agenda.

Also on the books for the next couple of months are a totally revamped web site and (crossing fingers) the eventual release of the oft-delayed Morning Light, sequel to The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice. Meantime, the never-before-published Mr. Darcy’s Obsession is available for pre-order and is already garnering some great reviews, including one from Booklist that will be released next week (they were kind enough to give me a sneak peak).

Oh, yes, and I’ve been on the road all summer. I started out on July 1, managed 12 whole days at home in August, and am now off again until early September. Fortunately, there’s been lots of inspiration along the way between writers’ conferences and time in Woods Hole, and it’s been fun.

By the way, comments on this blog now have a slight publication delay, not because I want anyone to hesitate to comment but because there’s been a major problem with spam comments (part of the inspiration for the website revamp). But I do love your comments, and none of them are being censored unless they selling something.

Best,
Abigail

After posting last night, I dug through my old emails to find the new title for From Lambton to Longbourn. The most recent is What Would Mr. Darcy Do?, and it’s scheduled to come out in Spring 2011. In the meantime, I’ve been making some adjustments to it.

From Lambton to Longbourn was my first Austen-related story, and I wrote it for an audience that knew Pride & Prejudice well. As a result, I could get away with starting the story mid-way through the scene at the Lambton Inn with a long quotation from P&P and no explanation whatsoever, and still count on my readers to know where they were and what was happening. It isn’t exactly conducive to convincing someone that they want to read the book! So I’ve gone back and written a new preliminary scene and thought I’d share it with you. Hopefully it provides a better introduction to the book. Read the rest of this entry »

The Man Who Loved Pride & Prejudice (the mass market release of Pemberley by the Sea under a new title*) has reached the bookstores! It’s a modern tale based on Pride & Prejudice set in the seaside village of Woods Hole, with a marine biologist as the heroine. It’s been garnering good reviews, including one at Austenesque Reviews. I’m celebrating by raffling off two autographed copies to lucky readers. If you’d like to be entered in the drawing, leave a comment on this post. If you post a link to the contest on your own blog, Facebook, or Twitter, that gives you an additional entry. I’ll draw the names on May 17.

Meantime, I’m going through the galleys for To Conquer Mr. Darcy (formerly Impulse & Initiative), and I’ve set a goal for finishing revisions to the newest Pemberley Variation by the end of May. Stay tuned for excerpts!

*My publisher is on a re-titling binge with Jane Austen-related fiction (mine and many other authors as well). It’s beyond the author’s control, but no writer wants you to buy their book under false pretenses. I strongly suggest checking book descriptions before buying new books to avoid paying money for something you’ve already read.

So, Darcy and Elizabeth were having this shy but touching conversation while sitting on a riverbank and talking about how the water flows to the sea, and suddenly Darcy starts whispering in my ear.

“Only a gentleman would master temptation.” Elizabeth did not know what else to say, and it seemed that neither did he, for the silence between them grew long. Finally she said archly, “I am glad, I suppose, to know that I was enough to tempt you.”

“Dearest, loveliest Elizabeth,” he breathed, his words a caress in themselves.

Whew! That Darcy is something else. Now I just need to figure out how to get them out of the big hole they’ve just dug themselves into….

So, my New Year’s resolution was to be more regular about my blog posts. You now know how good I am at keeping New Year’s resolutions! Anyway….

I attended a writing workshop this morning on world-building, courtesy of the local chapter of the Romance Writers of America. I wasn’t sure how much would be applicable for me, since the worlds I write aren’t my invention: Regency England, which I try to keep historically accurate, and modern-day Woods Hole, which actually exists. But even with the most reality-based settings, writers still have to pick out which important facts about the setting and the society to highlight, which becomes world-building of a sort. It made me realize that I use different worlds even in my Pemberley Variations, which take place in the same years, same locations, and even the same characters.

In Impulse & Initiative, Regency England is a fairly light-hearted place. There aren’t any poor people except a few servants who are quite contented with their lot, nobody gets seriously ill, and I blithely ignore the harsher realities of Regency life. It’s the Victorian view of the pre-industrial Regency as an age of perfect innocence. Well, there’s innocence and then there’s innocence, as it were, but most of us have inherited that quite fallacious view that the Regency was a perfected version of the Victorian hyper-moral universe, when actually it was quite decadent and far from innocent. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, which comes out this fall, is the story of what happens when Darcy, who believes he lives in the easy world of Impulse & Initiative, discovers he actually lives in a superficial society that builds its pleasures on the back of other people’s pain, where good birth is conidered of vastly more importance than good morals, and that he’s going to have to make some choices about whether to continue to pretend that everything is fine or to pay the price of publicly disagreeing with the status quo. Being Darcy, he of course makes the right decision, with some assistance from Elizabeth. But it’s a completely different world. The joys are different and the conflicts are different.

I’ve always thought of my Pemberley Variations as each highlighting different personality aspects of the characters created by Jane Austen. Impulse & Initiative Elizabeth is the traditional modern view of an arch and witty Elizabeth, whereas the Elizabeth in Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World is the Elizabeth who knows how to bite her tongue when the situation requires and has occasional periods of depression – all of which is described by Austen in Pride & Prejudice. It just depends on which parts you pay attention to. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that my worlds have changed as I’ve learned more about life in Regency England, the things Austen assumed her readers would know but which modern readers for the most part miss. Austen could refer in passing to Elizabeth’s periods of depression because that was a common and expected state for women then, so there was no need to dwell on it. The readers would fill in those blanks themselves. But we, as modern victims of the Victorian rewriting of Regency society, end up missing the significance of those brief references.

But none of this means that the world I built in Impulse & Initiative is in any way superior or inferior to the world of Mr. Darcy’s Obsession, because it’s all fiction. That’s sometimes a little hard to remember, especially when I get hung up in historical detail, but it’s more important for fiction to be convincing than absolutely accurate. Mr. Darcy’s Obsession takes place in a more historically accurate world, but I’ve still made it a happier place than it probably was, and it makes Darcy shine like a beacon of hope. The darker world shows the characters in brighter relief.

I’ve been so busy guest blogging and doing interviews on the virtual tour for the release of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World (at bookstores now!) that I’ve been neglecting this blog. But here are some links to the blogs I’m visiting:

~~Savvy Verse and Wit review and interview (and a lovely review it is!)

~~Interview at The Book Tree

~~Guest post at The Burton Review about how I choose scenes for my variations

~~Guest blog at Love Romance Passion about finding new aspects of the characters of Elizabeth and Darcy to explore

Tomorrow I’ll be blogging at Fresh Fiction about my life, writing process and routine. I’ll have another round of these each week this month. I don’t think I’ve done so much non-fiction writing since college, but it’s been fun. Thanks to all the bloggers who have hosted me!

Today I received my first copies of Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy: The Last Man in the World and was about to write about that, but then I got distracted by some old photographs of Russia in 1909-1912. In color. Not tinted. They were taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii with a color separation technique he invented using glass plates. The colors had long since leached out, but modern computer graphics wizards figured out a way to restore them. Voila – color photographs of pre-revolutionary Russia. Very cool, I thought, but I expected them to look like the usual tinted daguerrotypes. They didn’t. It’s very disconcerting. They look just like modern color photographs of a different time, but my brain tells me that can’t be true. Russia in 1909 was in black and white – we all know that.

I’ll show you a few examples, though to really appreciate them I suggest you go to the Library of Congress exhibit web site where you can click on the images to see full-size versions. Here’s the photographer himself:
.

The spa at Ekaternin Springs, probably not much different from what Elizabeth Bennet would have seen a hundred years earlier:

Lots of people have obsessed over anachronistic details in the 1995 TV adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, one of which is that Darcy’s second proposal takes place in front of a cornfield whose straight rows show it was planted by modern machinery. I thought of that when I saw this picture of agricultural fields in Samarkand. No straight lines need apply!

These pictures make me feel profoundly disoriented. I expect photographs of different eras to be either blurry black and white but authentic, or sanitized color modern recreations where everything is seen through the filter of present-day styles and expectations. You can tell a regency-set film from the 1980s from one in 2005 because they each appeal to ideas of beauty common then.

It makes me think about my own mental images of Regency life. I’ve taught myself to imagine the smells, the dirt, the poverty of the era, but this makes me realize that I’m still imposing a movie type of sensibility over my own images. I can’t subtract all my own expectations from it. Imagine Charlotte Lucas missing some of her teeth – not at all unlikely – but in my mental images everyone has all their teeth. After looking at these pictures, I’ve decided to try to create a regency color photograph in my mind. It makes me wonder about a lot of my regency writing.

Sorry I’ve been gone so long. I’ve just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer’s block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I’ve got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It’ll probably take several posts! Read the rest of this entry »